


nights and nights again

by partingxshot



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff, Gen, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 22:15:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partingxshot/pseuds/partingxshot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But then there are times when the moon is dark. The night is thick enough to pry open their doors, and they remember just how silent it can be outside their own thresholds. The children are far away, even at their sweetest. The night is long without the moon to remind them of the light of day.</p><p>And three hundred years, North marvels, is further than the billion miles to the sun.</p><p>(Or: the Guardians have quiet bonding time, and Jack tries to decide how he feels about that.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tooth

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't the only chapter, though the story won't be too long. You can read it as Jackrabbit if you want; we're getting pretty unrepentantly fluffy here either way. 
> 
> May be light alcohol use later on.

There are nights, and then there are nights again.

Sometimes they’re all off in their private corners of the universe, working to the sound of their own steady drumming. They know their own pieces and where they fit, how to assemble a toy or a dream or a memory waterlogged and torn with time. They are confident and centered, locked into the parts of themselves that see the most clearly and understand the deepest places.

It is enough, in those times, to protect their own (wind or yeti or tiny spring sprites in the form of new eggs). It is enough to know, and celebrate their own knowing. These are their homes, and they built them. 

But then there are times when the moon is dark. The night is thick enough to pry open their doors, and they remember just how silent it can be outside their own thresholds. The children are far away, even at their sweetest. The night is long without the moon to remind them of the light of day.

And three hundred years, North marvels, is further than the billion miles to the sun.

Moonless nights, he had once thought, were not so bad. The Arctic Circle spends a long time in darkness, after all. But now for whatever reason the glowing ice he sculpts burns in rebellion against his fingers. His model planes and crawling creatures do not fly as high as he would like, the weakened light of the chandelier struggling to hold them up. Outside the door his workers are too loud; his favorite chair is suddenly made up of sharp edges threatening to splinter.

The downside of a trial by fire that draws you closer to your friends: their absence, in turn, presses that much colder.

One moonless night, North picks up a snow globe and tosses it into the empty space at the center of his workshop. 

It glows bright, then turns.

 

The room above his workshop is wide and close to barren, reserved for gatherings that are more political than practical. The wooden floors are smooth, however, and the tapestries that hang from the walls embody the deep red richness that Tooth has come to associate with North. The fireplace is large and ornate, and when he starts the fire, all eyes are instinctively drawn to it.

Sandy and Bunny carry in the wide antique sofa from below, Sandy’s tiny body floating high enough to compensate for Bunny’s height. Tooth can hear the pooka’s grumbling, but he tries to keep his movements flatter to the ground than usual, sparing Sandy his habitual hops. 

She herself hovers almost nervously, looking for a way to contribute. North seems content to stroke the fire, and the blankets are already carefully folded in the corner. The elves have left a massive platter of cookies on the floor, clear sprinkles glittering against green frosting in the half-light. She will, of course, decline them if offered, but their presence feels right and the thought is sweet.

She casts around for something to say and settles on, “Where’s Jack?”

Sandy shrugs. The image of a boy surfing the air on his staff appears above his head, then melts into a group of children throwing snowballs. It’s out of season in Jack’s hometown, but that doesn’t seem to stop him.

“No, Jamie’ll be getting ready for bed by now,” she says. A fairy pokes at her shoulder; she lowers her voice and rattles off a series of commands without thinking. Youth hockey league tournament in Bristol tomorrow; expect a big haul.

“Who knows if he’ll come?” Bunny snorts. “Not that receptive to extracurriculars, is he?”

Tooth frowns, both because Bunny is wrong and because Bunny knows that he’s wrong. He flops down on the sofa with a big, over-casual stretch, and the fire plays in interesting patterns against his fur, reaching into some of the crevices and leaving others in shadow. His face is carefully flat. Tooth lets out an annoyed huff of breath. 

“He will be here,” North says, leaning back onto his haunches away from the flames. He lets the poker roll out of his fingers onto the floor, careless as a man who owns the house in which he works. “We will save him blanket.”

He’s right, of course. Hours later, Jack blows the door open with a cold bang and gusts into the room, landing with precision on the back of the sofa, one foot in front of the other. His short hair is kicked into that special unruliness that springs from his preferred method of travel, and small glittering somethings stick to his eyelashes. 

“Seriously?” he asks, eyeing the way Tooth is snuggled up against Sandy’s shoulder, who in turn rests against North’s generous torso. Jack crouches down to inspect them from above, staff held loosely under his arm. “We’re doing cuddle time?” His tone is amusement like chips of shining ice.

“What’s it to you?” Bunny says, words softened by the long, tired blink that comes after. Tooth reaches out and puts a hand on his. 

And in that one instant that does not belong to him, Jack looks very young. His gaze trips on the place where Bunny’s hand meets hers, then jumps to Sandy’s shoulder. Something lingers behind his eyes that Tooth recognizes.

Once, maybe four hundred years ago, she tried to coax an injured bird into her reach.

Jack cocks his head to the side, frozen for a split second watching them all. Then he straightens up again, movements too jerky. His toes curl around the thick paisley fabric beneath them. “Y’know North, when you said this would be a party–”

Tooth breathes, “Sit with us.” 

A beat of silence follows. Bunny’s hand goes very still beneath hers.

North lets loose a tremendous snore.

Jack laughs, and Tooth smiles. Almost nervously again – this shouldn’t make her nervous. She is warm and surrounded by those closest to her. But she is intimately familiar with her own anxieties and what they look like, and as she watches the tight-circling swing of Jack’s staff off the back edge of the sofa, the way he rocks back and forth on the soles of his bare feet, she decides that she is not alone.

“Seems kinda boring,” he says, unconvincingly casual. 

Sandy cranes his neck backwards to make a wryly disapproving face, and Jack’s lips twitch into a smile. “Not to insult your livelihood or anything.”

Tooth scootches away from Bunny, who gives her a quick look that she can’t quite interpret before he averts his eyes. “There’s room between us, Jack,” she says brightly. “Just slide in.”

Jack hesitates, smile frozen in place. “I’d just make you cold.” Bits of slush have started to flake from the tip of his nose, the hollow of his cheek.

“Blanket,” she says, and pulls hers tighter around her shoulders. “You can wear one too, for added insulation. And Bunny’s got fur for a reason.” She lets go of the pooka’s hand. 

“Won’t stop yeh from freezing my tail off,” he grumbles, but Tooth recognizes the consent in his tone. 

Another silence, rapidly climbing towards awkward. Tooth imagines she can feel Sandy breathing through the places where they are touching, though he has no real need. North murmurs something about La Befana, his voice gravelly in sleep. Jack blinks more than is natural, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes.

“Well,” he says suddenly, a swagger surfacing in his voice (and that nearly breaks her heart, because who needs bravado for this?) “When you put it like that.” He lets his staff clatter to the ground behind them and slides down onto the cushion, grinning cheekily at Bunny as he lands. 

Bunny plays along, making affronted noises as Tooth cheers and zips to the corner for Jack’s blanket. 

There are nights, she thinks, when everything is going to be okay.


	2. North

When they gather next month, the elves make the cookies with salt instead of sugar. North is furious (because they have literally done this task their entire lives, the little _duraki_ ) but Sandy suggests they make a new batch together and then it’s alright.

The industrial kitchens at the Pole are too enormous to be reckoned with by untrained individuals, but North has his own personal area set aside just down the hall from his workshop. He considers the room part of his private domain, though more often than not it’s still the elves making the goodies. The narrow area, in retrospect, probably works better for such tiny creatures. He nearly bowls Tooth over with his belly before she flits to the top of the counter to avoid collision; Bunny tries to squeeze past him and Sandy both before giving it up for a lost cause and relegating himself, scowling, to the corner. Jack chuckles from his seat on top of the refrigerator, feet dangling just next to Bunny’s ears. 

“Get in the game, Kangaroo. Aren’t you really into making desserts?”

“Yeah. Funny enough, though, you don’t hear as much about Easter cookies. Call me when you wanna whip up some chocolate.”

His tone echoes his habitual arguments with North, which makes North smile behind his beard. It’s good to see everyone getting along. 

“Jack,” he says. “You are in charge of chocolate chips.”

Tooth makes a panicked noise. “North, no, he’s gonna eat them all, just think of his beautiful teeth – oh, _no.”_

Jack is hovering in front of the cabinets already, stuffing bags of cooking chips in his arms. He flashes an exaggeratedly wide grin, showing off his premolars. Suddenly he’s across the small room and a foot from her face, popping a chip into his mouth.

“Jack Frost!” she shrieks, scandalized, and North laughs from the belly. 

The cookies turn out alright, though a bit more filled with melted chocolate and butterscotch than the recipe calls for. North knows that baking is more art than science anyway, and every piece of art is worth something, down to the cookie equivalent of a toddler’s finger-painting. In a way they’re the best kind, leaving smudges on his fingers as they sit and eat by the fire. He can’t seem to convince Bunny of that, however.

“There’s got to be a balance, is all I’m saying.” Bunny waves his half-eaten cookie around in a gesture that combines irritation with helplessness, apparently bewildered by his friends’ inability to understand. “You can’t just go pouring ingredients into treats willy-nilly, unless they’re _meant_ to be solid chocolate. You’ve gotta have a bit of respect for the kids’ tastes, space it out with something more – _oi, give it!”_

Jack cackles and launches off the sofa’s arm, cookie remnants held far of out Bunny’s reach. “I don’t think he deserves our cooking, does he, North?” His grin is wide and infectious; North recognizes the shape of it from a million children dancing among bits of discarded wrapping paper. Were Jack’s veins filled with warm blood, his cheeks would be flushed pink. He looks more comfortable than North has ever seen him.

“Baking,” he corrects affably. “Cooking is not same thing.”

“Really?” Tooth asks. He turns to see her head tilting quickly and quizzically, like a tiny bird. “I always thought –” Sandy nods in agreement, looking to North. They both sparkle beautifully in the firelight, Tooth’s lashes like tiny dewdrops and Sandy’s surface filled with small faux diamonds.

“Naw, they’re different,” Bunny says, turning back to the three others still sitting on the sofa.

“Hey,” Jack whines, tossing the cookie above his head. It floats there, buoyed by a cold gust. 

Bunny waves a dismissive hand at him, not looking back. “Baking is dry heating. Usually what you mean by cooking is–”

It happens slowly, but spread out evenly against his features, like an icicle melting in high heat. The lines of Jack’s face tip downwards into a frown. The wind ruffles his hair in what looks like a friendly manner, then dissipates, dropping the cookie to the floor where it breaks into gooey bits. Jack’s feet touch ground soon after. North notices, out of the corner of his eye, the way he doesn’t make more contact with the floor than necessary, poised on the balls of his feet until he starts walking towards the door. 

“You know what guys, I was thinking of doing a late frost in Wisconsin. Maybe later I’ll come around again.” Tooth breathes in sharply from North’s other side and he sees Bunny’s eyes move to meet hers. 

Sometimes it is very difficult to predict the reactions of their newest member. Three hundred years is further than the sun.

Jack goes behind the sofa, probably not comfortable walking too close to the fire. Bunny reaches back and grabs his collar. “Let me know if – hey!”

“Siddown, ya mug.” He bodily lifts Jack over, bashing the boy’s shin on the backrest and eliciting a selection of squawking sounds. He deposits him in the space between himself and North, or approximately where such a space would be located if it existed. Jack’s legs cover North’s lap, kicking against Tooth’s arm on the other side. He grips at the sofa back with one hand and braces against Bunny’s legs with the other, lest he find himself in his lap, eyes wide with panic and back arched uncomfortably. He scrambles to right himself, kicking North’s stomach in the process, and Bunny bursts into laughter. 

“Real funny,” Jack breathes as he swings his legs into a sitting position. But when Bunny punches him gently in the shoulder, wrist curved almost delicately like a rabbit’s paw, Jack smiles very slightly and doesn’t get up. The fit on their side of the sofa is tighter than the last time, and his legs are snug against both North’s and Bunny’s from knee to hip. 

“Scoot down a little bit,” North tells Sandy and Tooth, and the three of them do.

Jack doesn’t move with them. His shoulder rests against Bunny’s arm, gingerly but deliberately, and he does not try to leave again.


	3. Jack

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains recreational alcohol use.

The fifth time they break out the eggnog. It’s cold and sweet and rolls thickly down Jack’s tongue like it’s on a mission, so he doesn’t notice the slight alcoholic pinch of it until his second or third sip.

“Ain’tcha a bit young for this grog?” Bunny asks him. He eyes his own mug indifferently as though, in contrast to his words, his stomach was built for much sterner stuff and he is a bit insulted by the benignity of the drink in his hand.

“I was old enough when I was human,” Jack says defensively, scootching closer to the sofa’s backrest. “‘S not my fault the drinking age kept going up.”

“Oh, so you drank a lot then?” Bunny says with a teasing twist to his grin, as though anticipating the answer. 

“Well not, like, a _ton._ And afterwards it wasn’t really my priority with the whole ‘winter sprite’ thing going on.” The idea of being tipsy doesn’t connect at all with the thought of being around kids. He can’t put the two pieces next to each other, much less make them fit.

Tooth swoops in from behind them, depositing a variety of cushions on the ground. They’ve moved the sofa further from the fire to compensate, but the cushions are still close enough to make North’s face shine in the heat as he plops down onto the largest one. Sandy follows Tooth soon after with a gigantic mound of throw pillows obscuring his entire face. Rather than put them down gently he lets them drop. A few of them scatter, rolling this way and that on their rounded edges. Others sit contentedly in a soft pile.

“Anyway,” Jack says, eyeing the stack, “it’s seriously just eggnog.”

Bunny snorts like Jack doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but before Jack can swing back he’s changed the subject.

“Are those gonna be too hot for you?” He gestures with barely more than a twitch of his ear towards the pillow pile. Then he takes a sip of his eggnog, eyes wandering towards the spot where Sandy is trying in vain to squeeze in next to North on the plushest cushion available. 

Jack opens his mouth to complain for the billionth time that he doesn’t have to be babied around sources of heat, but Bunny’s eyes flicker back towards him, bright and solid green divided sharply from defined black pupils (tough packed-in earth around fragile growing things), and instead he finds himself saying, “Nah, I’m good as long as I’m the furthest back.”

“Cheers!” Tooth says, shoving her mug between the two of them, wide fluttering wings made even more iridescent by the fire shining through.

“Cheers,” Bunny says. The jaunty clink is muffled by North’s booming laugh at one of Sandy’s jokes. Tooth beams at them both, exhale bordering on a silent giggle, and Jack wonders if she’s gotten a head start on them or if she really just has a bird-sized tolerance to alcohol.

The temperature of the mug’s rim drops rapidly against the skin of his lips. He smiles against the porcelain.

At some point things go soft.

He is warm, yes, but not uncomfortable. It’s a spinning sort of feeling that he only remembers very vaguely from a time faded into the special obliqueness that covers his human memories. At one point that distance had felt like a burial shroud; now it’s more akin to a thick quilt, folded up like padding for things internal and essential and almost perfect when you hold them up to the light.

Lights – they move in strange patterns, playing across the baroque patterns on the ceiling and the twinkle in North’s eyes. 

North laughs and reaches out to steady him with a big, calloused hand; Jack hadn’t even realized he was tilting where he sat. 

“Perhaps my special holiday cheer is a bit too strong this year, at least to growing boy,” he booms, all ruddy smiles and teasing tallness that makes Jack crane his neck upwards even when they’re on the floor right next to each other. So really, it’s doubly his fault if Jack falls.

“It’s not the holidays yet and it didn’t taste strong,” he finds himself mumbling. “And I don’t grow a lot. At all, I mean. I mean I haven’t for awhile. Why would I?” He frowns; the words are all the things he wants to say, but he seems to have lost the ability to hold them back long enough to arrange them into less stupid-sounding sentences. Then he realizes it doesn’t really matter, because the others know him and they know what he’s trying to say (is that the drink spreading tingling giddiness slowly down his spine?).

“Ah,” North nods sagely, giving Jack’s shoulder a squeeze that he doesn’t want to flinch back from. “Is deceptively potent mixture. You should have seen Bunny when–”

“Oi,” Bunny says lazily from two pillows away. “We’re takin’ the piss out of Frostbite this time around, remember?” Jack wants to respond until he sees Bunny’s leg twitch in annoyance like a rabbit thumping at the ground, fine control over such instincts apparently dulled. Jack laughs delightedly, and the confused look Bunny gives him just makes him giggle more. 

After a second, Bunny’s face goes soft to match the rest of the room. The lines of his mouth tip upwards and he chuckles with the same unexpected gentleness he does around Sophie Bennett. More giddiness shoots down to Jack’s bare toes as Sandy floats in slow, lazy circles towards the ceiling, trailing sand, tipping himself upside-down to tease out Tooth’s shrieks of laughter. 

North doesn’t remember to take his hand from Jack’s shoulder for a long time, and Jack is dizzy and warm in a way that doesn’t suffocate or bind. His limbs are heavy, but a part of him is spiraling upwards with Sandy, breath gentle in his chest, the taste of eggnog in the space over his tongue. 

Everybody shuffles around as the night wears on. When he falls asleep, he’s lying against something soft.

He wakes up once before morning, drooling into Tooth’s lap as she sleeps sitting up against the foot of the sofa, head lolled back onto the cushion. He feels something heavy slung over his calves – one of North’s limbs, probably. Bunny is lying between Jack and the fireplace, ears spread at odd angles over Tooth’s lap as his furry head touches the side of her legs. His hand clasps Jack’s lower arm. Once Jack takes that in, he feels Tooth’s hand lying on his hair. 

He almost panics.

It’s just that there are a lot of limbs, right, and he doesn’t know how long they’ve existed so close to his skin. And when he thinks about it he knows that everyone else was sitting closer to the fire before, because for them the heat means life and energy, but Jack is cold to the touch even when he feels the _illusion_ of warmth brought on almost like a hallucination from a few mugs of eggnog. He isn’t warm like they are warm. He isn’t pleasant to hold hands with, and they’ve moved away from the fire. 

He hears a rustle from the couch above, so he makes himself breathe deeply.

Sandy’s smile has always been a baffling mixture of enthusiastic and serene. The golden head peeks down at him from over the sofa cushions, spiky hair barely affected by the slight drag of gravity that has never proved much of a problem for either of them. 

Jack blinks up at him, and forces his eyes to go less wide. “Getting your job done?” he whispers, feeling detached from his own voice.

Sandy nods, bright-eyed. Now that he thinks about it, Jack can’t figure out any reason for alcohol to affect a body literally made from tiny rock crystal, even though he’s pretty sure the eggnog was Sandy’s idea in the first place. The other Guardian winks at him as though he can hear; Jack wonders if he can sense echoes of dreams in those just shaking off sleep. 

Free-floating grains detach from his hair and pour themselves into the image of a crescent moon. 

“I will, I will,” Jack grumbles, feeling the tightness in his chest easing off, just a little bit. “I’m just. It’s kinda cramped.” The hardwood floor isn’t the most comfortable thing against his back either, even through blankets and the occasional throw pillow.

The moon spins in on itself until it’s shaped like a boy in a hoodie. He bends his sandy knees and takes off from the imaginary ground, limbs straightening out behind him like he’s stretching towards the sky.

Jack tries to frown, but his muscles feel all slack. “No, I don’t want to _leave,_ I just…”

His staff sits somewhere behind the sofa, propped against the far wall. He can’t see it, but he knows its presence like a phantom limb. He hasn’t willingly been this far from it in ages. The thought somehow doesn’t cause him any distress.

Bunny’s ear twitches in his sleep, and his nose nuzzles slightly into Tooth’s leg. North is snoring again, and Jack can sort of make out Tooth’s open-mouthed snuffling as well, a sound that should be turbulent but on her sounds like a timepiece.

He doesn’t feel tipsy anymore, but things are still so soft.

Sandy looks down at him in a way that would be penetrating from anyone else, but Jack does not feel that he’s being cross-examined. The floating image forms itself into a sofa, and Sandy pats the seat next to him. An escape route, if he needs it.

For a moment there is more _world_ in Jack than he knows what to do with, stretching out his chest and folding cleanly into the embers of a fireplace (fur brushing against his arm). The sensation is startling and new and not at all unpleasant. 

The elves will probably bring them cookies in a few hours.

He breathes in, and he feels the room filling up his lungs.

He does go sit with Sandy for a little while. But come morning, the others wake to find him pressed close to each of them, tangled in blankets and limb to limb.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] nights and nights again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149244) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account), [partingxshot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/partingxshot/pseuds/partingxshot)




End file.
